FDE: The $1M/Year AI Job Explained

I know it's crazy, but there are people making a million dollars a year as forward deploy engineers. But what exactly is an FDE? I know you've probably seen it, but I feel like a lot of people aren't clear as to what it is and how they could become one. Well, in this episode, I brought on my friend Vas, and Vas is a leading expert when it comes to FDEs with his company, Verik Agents. And in this episode, he gives you his entire playbook, how you could become an FDE in thirty days. Now, this episode is for people who wanna become an FDE, but also for people who are just interested in what it means, how they can actually use FDEs in their business to be-- make more money, to be more productive. And I just think this is the clearest episode, the clearest piece of content on the internet, the clearest master class for how to understand clearly what an FDE is, how you could become one, and why it matters. Enjoy the episode, and I'll see you at the end. [upbeat music] The Startup Grind podcast. It's sippin' time, baby. Vas is here, and Vas, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

They're gonna learn exactly how to break into forward deployed engineering or become a better FDE in thirty days, the full roadmap for AI forward deployed engineering.

And I don't feel like this has been shared anywhere. I feel like the term forward deploy engineer is just, like, on my X feed everywhere. So what I'm hoping for, Vas, is for you to clearly explain what this means and just, like, all the concepts to it and just break it down for me in a clear, easy to understand way so, so I could, uh, so I could, you know, learn from it, but so others can learn from it too.

Absolutely. And there's a lot of different definitions. Everyone has their own, and I'm gonna give you what I think is the clearest explanation.

Okay, let's do it.

Sweet. So yeah, this has never been shared before. This is something our team put together. Uh, it's how to break into FDE in thirty days. Let's start off with, uh, recent developments and the facts of today. The reality is every company can now buy intelligence. You know, you have a frontier model being released every single day. Just yesterday, we had Kimi Three being released. Uh, last week was Fable, uh, Five, you know, or GPT-506 Soul. Every company can now buy intelligence, and the reality is intelligence is becoming commoditized. So the same foundational capability is becoming available to anybody who can pay for it, and that's most companies today. So what you'll see here is a graphic where every company has access to the same foundational model. So if everyone can access it, intelligence can no longer be the moat. I think there was this huge theory that, you know, people will be priced out of intelligence, and that could be the case in the future. But the reality is today, everyone has access to the same tools. If you go and talk to fifty different enterprise clients, they're all using the same stack. They're all using Claude Code, Codex. They're using Cursor for model agnosticism. Uh, they're using GitHub Copilot. It's all the same thing. So the reality is everyone has the same capability in terms of what intelligence